The Alliance Defense Fund announced today that a lawsuit had been filed in federal court on behalf of a Catholic nurse who says her employer, Mount Sinai Hospital, forced her to assist in performing a late-term abortion in spite of her strongly held religious beliefs against abortion. The suit alleges the nurse had repeatedly made her faith-based objections to assisting abortions clearly known to hospital administrators from the time she was hired, even signing a written statement stating her objection. It also states the hospital had a clear written policy …
Much of the controversy in President Obama and congressional Democrats’ health care overhaul thus far has focused on the public option and concerns with the budget-busting price tag. But as negotiations in Congress on hundreds of pages of complex legislative text continue to move at break-neck pace, all leading up to floor consideration scheduled in the next few weeks, the issue of taxpayer funding for abortion is threatening to take center stage. Just before Congress broke for the 4th of July recess, nineteen Democrat members of the House sent a …
On July 2, 2009, the Congressional Budget Office produced its second preliminary analysis of title I of the “Affordable Health Choices Act,” as drafted by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP). This CBO “score” has been used a great deal over the past few weeks in the specific analysis of the HELP version of health care reform legislation, but it also is a valuable lesson in using caution against oversimplification. It provides some, but not all of the critical answers needed to fully understand reform legislation. …
Senate Democrats are desperately trying every trick in the book to get the lowest possible cost scoring out of the CBO. Ethics and Public Policy Center fellow James Capretta descends into the weeds to explain the latest regressive tax they have come up with to pay for their health care plans: Senate Democrats, including, have also Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus discovered the budgetary virtues of heavy-handed government decrees. If you want to expand insurance coverage, you can simply make people sign up for a plan — whether they want …
Three weeks ago, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a preliminary score of the Kennedy-Dodd health reform bill. CBO estimated that Title I of the draft legislation alone would have added $1 trillion to the federal deficit while only extending coverage to 16 million of the uninsured. The score sent the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee back to the drawing board. Although Democrats on the HELP committee pledged to be bipartisan and transparent as they reworked the bill, those promises were broken late last week. While the …
Under the government-proposed public health plan, “people will involuntarily lose their coverage and will be bled into the new plan,” said Heritage’s senior policy analyst for health care Nina Owcharenko at yesterday’s Blogger Briefing. “They expect they would have their private insurance plans competing with the public plan but at the end of the day the public plan will be the last one standing,” she said. Owcharenko explained that the legislative process isn’t moving at the rapid pace once anticipated. So far, the Kennedy-Dodd bill is still incomplete. The House has introduced …
In February 1994, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said that the Clinton health plan would add $74 billion to the deficit over the following six years. And that spelled the beginning of the end of the Clinton plan to have the federal government supervise the financing and delivery of health care. Yesterday, CBO – an officially nonpartisan office whose director is appointed by the Democratic Congressional leadership – released its “preliminary” score of the Kennedy-Dodd bill. If enacted, the proposal would increase the federal budget deficit by $1 trillion over …
